Adventure Magazine Cover, August 18, 1921 — page 150: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

144 stopped and with startled, inquisitive eyes looked innocently at him. With all the steadiness he could command he fired at it. The deer fell. | With eager footsteps he hurried his fastest to it, knelt and cut its throat. The warm blood spurted out, spurted over his hands. In herror, sickening, deadly horror, he rose shakily and stumbled thirstily away. The sun was sinking. At last he was back on jamiliar ground. At last he found foot- marks. Straining his ears he listened in- tently for the sound of human voices. Listened and listened. And as he listened he hurried crouchingly, despairingly, fearing to lose the footmarks ere the sun went down. The sun dipped and the tropic night com- menced to fall. His dull eyes brighterted, his pulse quickened. More footmarks, a second lot. Surely he must be close to salvation. Next moment he sagged, sank senseless to the ground. Senseless where he had slept the night before. NI fulness returned. The heavy dew of = night had settled on him and frozen and he was distressingly cold. Cold all but his head. His head was throbbing, bound- ing and throbbing again. He put up his hands to press it. His hands fell listlessly back and bumped into the sand. His mouth was gone and in its place was a furnace. A scorching, roaring furnace. Fiercely he reached his lips, relentlessly he ripped them apart, and when the blood reached his tongue and moistened it he licked and licked and sucked at them. With an effort he rose to a sitting posi- tion. The sun leaped into the sky. The clothes on his body steamed and dried THE sun was not yet up when wake- picked at himself like a caged monkey. By degrees with the aid of his rifle he levered himself to his feet. His bones cracked, his muscles cracked. The rifle burned him and he looked at it queerly. Bush, bush, bush. Reeds, reeds, scrub. A desert of green and gray clean away to the sky-line. For a moment—a moment only —he saw it all with the eyes of a human being. His brain, his body, his heart, his very soul shouted for water. Water, water, water. Water he had to have. And as they dried he picked at them— Adventure Blindly, without any attempt at reason- ing, he ventured off into the bush without any earthly thought of direction. For a hundred years or so he rocked along. Water, water, water. Water, water or death. At the end of the hundred yards he stopped suddenly, stood looking inanely, stupidly at his rifle. It burned his hands. Mystitied he looked at one hand. Blis- tered! Crazily he looked at the other hand. Blistered! With a snarl he lifted the rifle and with all his remaining strength cast it away into the scrub. A few yards farther and the knowledge that his boots hurt him oozed into his flut- tering thoughts. Three days and nights he had them on and only now discovered they pained him. Sitting he took them off and threw them from him. His socks followed. The sun scorched till he felt like cracking. His walk grew slower. The clothes on his back scratched him and cut his dry skin. Water, water, water. His body was shrivel- ing up. The scratching continued. It seemed his shirt was flaming. Dully he stopped, his dull eyes fixed on the horizon. Bush, bush, bush. Reeds, reeds and scrub. Dully he turned com- pletely round and looked in all directions. Bush, bush, bush. Reeds, reeds and scrub everywhere. With a frothing curse he tore madly at his shirt. Tore, struggled and ripped at it. With an oath he flung it away. Away went his hat. Then cursing, howling and crying bitterly he tore piece by piece every stitch of clothing from his body. Every- thing but his waist-belt. And. but for that Charlie Maddocks stood as naked as Adam. For an instant he stood and thumped his chest loudly with his clenched fists. For one last instant he looked humanly, hungrily, longingly at the sky-line. Then animal entered and man left. With the strength of an animal he bounded into the bush. And shrieking, yelling, screaming, laughing, heedless of thorns or snakes, he tore his mad way through it. BABIAAN, the gray-haired, wrin- kled old chief, jogging along com- a fortably on his horse after visiting a kraal thirty miles away, dreamily looked across to a rocky hill, a kopje, a few hundred yards to his left. COmiclbook CO